Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting, but likely much longer.

13 comments:

That one with the rose petals is awesome. Beautiful colors, and the look on the face of the woman on the right, like "Could you wild young things turn it down for a bit, I'm trying to have a langorous nap here," is delightful.

Jenners: But comparing them is quite easy, isn't it? One looks at the two groups of art images, examines one's aesthetic and intellectual response, perhaps consider one's necessarily fragmentary understanding of the place of the work within the overall context of World or Western history and artistic tradition, and says "Hey! I think I like this artist better than that artist, at least for the time being!"

For instance, today I'm feeling that Alma-Tadema's preposterous Victorian classicism has unexpectedly grown on me -- he's a hella colorist -- and that Algardi's obvious skill with a chisel isn't enough to overcome a certain heavy dullness I find not only in his work, but in most representational sculpture. So I'm voting for Sir Lawrence, somewhat to my surprise.

Meanwhile, through this exercise I've learned of the existence of Alma-Tadema and Algardi and marginally improved my understanding of the Victorian age, the use of color in art, sculpture, the difficulties of photographing sculpture, Italy, and the history of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and I've had a chance to bounce my ideas about art against those of a select cadre of brave tournament voters. It's like an Art History degree, except better.

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